The present invention generally relates to photograph processing and, more particularly, to a system and method for contextual personalized focus for variable depth of field photographs on social networks.
Variable depth of field photographs allow a user to modify the focus point of a picture after the picture has been taken. The user can, for example, change from focusing on an object in the foreground of the picture to an object in the background of the picture. This is currently a manual process whereby a user selects an object in a variable depth of field photograph and the photograph is rendered to show this selected object as the focus point.
Traditional fixed depth of field photographs define a focus point when a photograph is captured, which in turn determines what is in and out of focus in that photograph. Variable depth of field photography is an emerging technology whereby software is used to modify the depth of field in post processing of a photograph. This allows the focus point to be changed after a picture has been taken—effectively allowing the user to change what is in or out of focus in a photograph.
There are several technologies that support variable depth of field. These technologies are implemented both on dedicated cameras and on mobile devices. A light field camera is a dedicated camera that captures information about the intensity of light in a scene, and also captures information about the direction that the light rays are traveling. This data is then reconstructed as a photograph where the user can select the focus point. Merged multiple exposure is a regular camera (such as a mobile device camera) that takes multiple pictures of the same scene, each with a different focus point, and merges these into a single picture file. When a user selects an area to focus on, the exposure that best focuses on the selected area is used. Dual lens cameras use a secondary lens to capture depth information when a photograph is taken with the primary lens. This collects rudimentary depth information which can be processed in software to enable a variable depth of field. Software blurring is a technique in which software analyzes a photograph's areas of contrast and applies a blur effect to various regions to simulate a shallow depth of field.